Reason: Fact-Checking, Schmack-Checking
I think it used to be better. Is it just an old guy talking nostalgically or have things really declined?
Author's Preface
This is not a declaration of certainty, nor a nostalgic lament for a mythologized past. It is an effort to understand how journalistic practices once aimed at truth-telling have become mechanisms for managing interpretation—how “fact-checking” has transformed from an effort at empirical accuracy into an instrument of narrative enforcement. The decline of objectivity in journalism, the rise of ideologically motivated verification, and the emergence of alternative platforms all raise serious questions about where reliable knowledge is to be found. This essay explores those questions.
Introduction: The Shift from Verification to Authority
There was a time—not perfect, but better—when journalism broadly agreed on the importance of separating fact from interpretation. Fact-checking was one of the tools meant to uphold that separation. It involved correcting names, numbers, quotes, dates, and misstatements—things that could be verified through documentation, evidence, and independent observation.
Today, fact-checking has taken on a new role. It now frequently addresses interpretive claims, causal judgments, and value-laden assertions—areas where evidence is often partial, ambiguous, or contested. In doing so, it increasingly functions as an assertion of authority rather than an exercise in inquiry.
This shift is not merely stylistic. It reflects deep institutional, ideological, and epistemological changes. And it is nowhere more evident than in the collapse of trust in mainstream media and the concurrent rise of independent journalism on platforms like Substack and Brownstone Institute, where many of the most cogent critiques of fact-checking now emerge.
Discussion: How Did We Get Here?
The decline of fact-checking as a dispassionate practice and its transformation into a politicized activity can be attributed to a number of overlapping developments. Each of the following represents a plausible component in the broader story.
1. Postmodernism and the Academic Disassembly of Objectivity
Beginning in the mid-20th century, postmodern theorists began to question the very idea of objectivity. Thinkers such as Foucault, Derrida, and Lyotard emphasized that what we call “truth” is often a construction embedded in discourse and power. The result was a conceptual climate in which truth came to be seen as relative to perspective, and objectivity was recast as an ideological pretense.
These ideas filtered into journalism schools and media institutions, contributing to a cultural shift. Many contemporary journalists are trained in frameworks that view facts as inseparable from interpretation. The once-clear boundary between reporting and opinion has eroded. Fact-checking, in this context, becomes an effort to enforce approved interpretations, not just correct falsehoods.
2. Governmental and NGO Sponsorship of Narrative Management
The rise of institutional “misinformation” watchdogs has entangled fact-checking with state power and para-state influence. Governments, often working through third-party NGOs, have increasingly defined acceptable speech under the guise of public safety and information integrity.
Fact-checking organizations now receive funding from government-linked entities.
Social media platforms partner with these bodies to label and suppress dissenting views.
Interpretive disagreements—especially on geopolitics, public health, or elections—are reclassified as falsehoods.
As Piers Robinson, editor of Propaganda in Focus and a scholar of media and propaganda, has written, these efforts amount to ideological policing under the cover of epistemic concern. The effect is not just suppression of lies, but the delegitimization of dissent.
3. Corporate Capture and Platform Moderation
Modern journalism is increasingly shaped by economic incentives, advertiser tolerance, and algorithmic visibility. Legacy outlets operate under declining revenues and growing dependence on corporate funding. Meanwhile, social media platforms—the new public square—enforce visibility through opaque moderation.
Fact-checking, under these conditions, functions as:
A brand-safety mechanism.
A tool of legal risk management.
A filter to ensure content is "platform-appropriate".
As alternative journalist Eli Grober has pointed out on Substack, what gets labeled “true” or “false” often depends less on factual grounding than on alignment with dominant narratives. Fact-checking thus becomes not a filter for truth but a proxy for acceptability.
4. Epistemic Decline within Journalism
There has also been a breakdown in journalistic discipline. Where once journalists were trained to distinguish between fact and opinion, to verify claims independently, and to avoid inserting themselves into the story, today many are shaped by ideological training and institutional pressures to conform.
There is less emphasis on:
Cross-checking independent sources.
Investigating claims with detachment.
Signaling the difference between observation and interpretation.
As a result, fact-checking becomes interpretive from the outset. It routinely offers verdicts not on falsehoods but on rival readings of events. This is no longer journalism in its traditional form—it is narrative curation.
5. The Rise of the Alternative Sphere
Into this vacuum have stepped independent journalists and thinkers, many of whom publish on Substack, Brownstone, or Propaganda in Focus. These include:
Nate Silver (The Rise and Fall of Fact-Checking)
Mark Crispin Miller (News from Underground)
The Brownstone Institute (multiple critical essays on fact-checking's collapse)
Taming Complexity (Why Fact-Checking Won’t Save Democracy)
These voices are not united in ideology. In fact, they often disagree with one another. That is precisely the point: disagreement is evidence of independence. These platforms are not beholden to the same corporate or state funding networks that shape mainstream media. They offer friction, critical inquiry, and competing interpretations—none of which guarantees truth, but all of which are necessary conditions for finding it.
6. Fact, Interpretation, and the Problem of Human Judgment
Even in the best conditions, the separation of fact from interpretation is not always clear-cut. Much of reality is ambiguous:
Evidence is incomplete.
Testimony is fallible.
Interpretation depends on worldview.
While heuristics can help in sorting through competing claims, there is no algorithm to adjudicate complex questions. Judgment is required. That judgment is shaped by prior knowledge, emotional framing, and contextual experience. It is fallible. And yet, it is all we have.
Fact-checking, if honest, would acknowledge its limitations. But in its politicized form, it often presents interpretive assertions as objective truth. This not only distorts the issue but shuts down discourse by branding disagreement as misinformation.
Summary: From Inquiry to Ideological Enforcement
Fact-checking has not disappeared—it has changed. Its current form often reflects not a pursuit of factual clarity but an exercise in narrative control. This shift arises from an interwoven mesh of academic relativism, state-backed communication regimes, corporate filtration, and epistemic degradation within journalism itself.
In response, alternative platforms have become the primary venues for critical reflection. Their value lies not in offering a single authoritative truth but in disrupting enforced consensus and opening the space for reasoning, dissent, and epistemic humility.
The task now is to reassert the difference between fact and interpretation, even if that boundary is fuzzy. It is precisely in the gray areas where careful reasoning must be preserved, rather than bulldozed by ideologically captured gatekeeping masquerading as epistemic rigor.
Selected Readings
Brownstone Institute. (2022). How “fact-checking” obliterates truth. Retrieved from https://brownstone.org/articles/how-fact-checking-obliterates-truth/
Brownstone Institute. (2022). The fact-checking game. Retrieved from https://brownstone.org/articles/the-fact-checking-game/
Robinson, P. (2023). Propaganda in focus. https://propagandainfocus.com/guy-debords-warning-of-the-role-of-the-expert-a-philosophical-perspective-on-the-rise-of-fact-checking/
Taming Complexity. (2023). Why fact-checking won’t save democracy. https://tamingcomplexity.substack.com/p/why-fact-checking-wont-save-democracy?utm_source=publication-search
Zuboff, S. (2019). The age of surveillance capitalism. New York: PublicAffairs. https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=56791
Appendix A: On the Reality of Incontrovertible Facts
This should be obvious to anyone who is not tied up in abstraction, theoretical knots, blinded by theory. The assertion that “everything is interpretation” collapses under certain conditions. While interpretation plays a role in how facts are perceived, communicated, and evaluated, there exist material realities and irreversible events that are not susceptible to semantic revision or ideological framing. These are incontrovertible facts—real-world phenomena that assert themselves with such clarity and force that they nullify relativistic claims when encountered directly.
The following examples illustrate such facts. They are not chosen for shock value, nor are they mundane. They represent situations where the distinction between fact and interpretation is minimal to nonexistent.
1. The Absence of Air at Altitude
At high altitudes, above the survivable range of atmospheric pressure, a human being without pressurized support loses consciousness within seconds and dies shortly thereafter. This is not a matter of opinion, theory, or sociopolitical framing. No interpretation changes the outcome. The fact is physiological and demonstrable: without oxygen, human life ends.
2. Touching Molten Metal with Bare Skin
Contact with molten iron at over 1,500°C causes immediate destruction of biological tissue. There is no interpretive framework in which this becomes non-damaging or harmless. The fact is a function of thermal energy transfer and human vulnerability. The result is empirical, irreversible, and unambiguous.
3. Jumping from a Great Height
A person who jumps from a 30-story building without safety equipment will experience gravitational acceleration resulting in fatal impact. This is a physical law, not a linguistic construct. The outcome is not dependent on belief, ideology, or cultural context. The ground does not negotiate.
4. Exposure to Hard Vacuum
In the vacuum of space, unprotected humans suffer boiling of bodily fluids, swelling, hypoxia, and death within approximately one minute. These effects are not theorized—they are known through controlled experimentation and aerospace incidents. Interpretation does not alter the physiology of pressure differentials.
5. Detonation of High-Explosive Material
When TNT, RDX, or other high-energy explosives are detonated within a fixed radius, any nearby human being is either killed or maimed. The chemistry is nonnegotiable. Interpretive discourse is irrelevant to blast pressure, shrapnel velocity, or internal trauma. The consequences are dictated by physics and chemistry, not belief.
Conclusion
These examples reinforce that some facts assert themselves beyond interpretive mediation. While most claims in social discourse are filtered through language, ideology, and incomplete evidence, these material phenomena remind us that there are domains in which fact is not constructed—it is encountered.
Interpretation has its place, and most of human reasoning occurs within its bounds. But to deny the existence of non-interpretable facts is to abandon the ground on which all reliable judgment rests.